September 29, 2006

This was a big week for Glassbox. We started off by presenting a tech talk on Java Troubleshooting with Glassbox at Google we had some great feedback at the talk and a lunch before and are looking forward to further feedback as teams there try the technology.

Later this, week I also had a good on site visit with a major business information provider where we installed and tested Glassbox on Weblogic and Tomcat for a variety of interesting applications. We also started work on integrating with a high availability system for a hospital, to provide performance and liveliness data. We are looking to provide more rich API's to allow writing custom extensions and deeper integration with Glassbox. We see a great opportunity to extend our monitoring with focused, application specific descriptions of components, service level agreements, and metrics. The idea is that you should be able to get useful data out of the box but can leverage the power of AOP to get more insight with a small investment. I'd love your input on this.

September 22, 2006

We just posted a new feature for Glassbox on our Web site this week: a live demo of Glassbox running against our "cranky" Pet Store, showing how it can diagnose problems in an application. This is a great way to try out Glassbox and to share it with colleagues. Behind the scenes we're running Tomcat with Glassbox and JPetstore and MySQL and using a nice open source load testing tool, OpenSTA, to create sample load. The JPetstore application has a few extra problems added but we made no changes to integrate with Glassbox. I'd be interested in your feedback...

May 18, 2006

If you are at JavaOne this week, make sure to see Rob Harrop demonstrate a preview of the next generation of Glassbox tomorrow (Friday) at 1:15pm at Designing Manageable J2EE™ Platform-Based Applications With JMX™ Technology with an Ajax Web application that provides summaries of application problems like failing connections or slow remote calls and JMX console integration for detailed drill-downs into applications. Here is a preview:

Rob and I spent some time yesterday to discuss Glassbox and to get him a preview of our new technology. Rob, Keith Donald (who leads Spring Web Flow) and I also discussed how Glassbox can use with Spring AOP to provide deep insight into Spring applications with negligible overhead.

I've also been enjoying catching up with friends and meeting new people at JavaOne parties. Thanks to Simon Phipps, BEA and Tangosol, and Geronimo and partners for hosting some great festivities. To me, the big story at this JavaOne is how open source technologies built on Java are winning at every level. Whether in Web application frameworks or application servers, the primary contenders are increasingly open source...